Chris Graham: Surprised by JMU sacking Mickey Matthews? Not at all

Chris Graham

One perspective on Mickey Matthews is that he should have been able to decide the day that he left JMU and even had a hand in picking the guy who would sculpt the statue to his tenure. You win a national championship and take a football program at a school that didn’t play football until 1972 to the precipice of FBS, and they eventually name the field after you.

Earth Talk: Greener ways to frack for natural gas?

Roddy Scheer

Hydraulic fracturing (known as “fracking”) is a method of causing fissures in underground shale rock formations to facilitate the extraction of otherwise inaccessible natural gas and oil. In a typical fracking operation, drillers inject a mixture of pressurized water and chemicals underground to fracture the rock and free up the gas and oil.

State Board of Education approves A-F school grading system

Chris Graham

The Virginia Board of Education today unanimously approved an A-F grading system that will assign letter grades to schools based on the percentages of students demonstrating proficiency, academic growth and college and career readiness. Initial letter grades will be announced at the beginning of the 2014-2015 school year.

university of virginia uva

UVa. artificial pancreas project receives $3.4 million grant

AFP

A high-tech project to turn an ordinary smart phone into an artificial pancreas that could transform the lives of people with type 1 diabetes has received a $3.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. The money will fund a new network approach to artificial pancreas design using distributed computing between local and Cloud systems.

university of virginia uva

South African student explores innovative HIV ideas at UVa.

AFP

Lufuno Mavhandu, who grew up in the small village of Muduluni, is conducting research at UVa. as part of an important collaboration between the Myles H. Thaler Center for AIDS and Human Retrovirus Research in the School of Medicine and the Department of Microbiology at South Africa’s University of Venda.